Five months, entombed without food, light, warmth, they emerge
full of moon, mid of May, migrating from far reaches of the continental shelf:
horseshoe crabs following moon's ultraviolet rays with ancient eyes

Over rocks, through meanders, against currents, they glide
upside-down,
mysterious shelled sea-spiders steering with long tails used
as arrowheads by Paleo-Indians twelve millennia ago
Among the ooze and fiddlers, barnacle-encrusted carapaces hook as one,
tearshaped bodies, ancient as the mother Atlantic, 300 million years
Compound eyes rise on stalks seeking spots to lay their teeming burdens

Scratching, raising clouds of muck, the waters obscured;
in a sucking, oozing rhythm, they deposit their primitive life, then
backing away, bodies still clasped, disappear among the depths